Page 4260 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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ICT sustainability is a key consideration in the government’s draft ICT strategic plan. Managing and using ICT to promote environmental responsibility is one of the five key objectives of the plan, which includes a range of measures that will build on the current initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint of government ICT. This will include the further use of energy efficient hardware at the desktop and server levels, virtualisation and thin-client technology. Planning is also well underway for the move to more energy efficient data management within government.
The ACT government is an ICT innovator and we are currently developing new ways to accurately measure our ICT carbon footprint. This will allow us to set measurable reduction targets which contribute to the overall government reduction commitments. As important as the carbon reduction of the government’s ICT itself is the contribution that ICT can make in providing and linking the environmental information that enables us to manage our energy usage overall. Whether it is gathering real-time meteorological information with watering rosters or using smart meters to optimise power usage, government ICT will play an important part.
The government has already developed a 10-year data management strategy to consider the future of data centre and storage needs and to underpin our forward planning. The key to this strategy is investigating opportunities to use clean technologies as part of our future data storage strategies to deliver both cost-effective and environmentally responsible data management. In the immediate future the government is continuing to investigate the use of “free air” cooling for data centres utilising a strategy of filtering outside air to cool data centres during Canberra’s winter months rather than powering air-conditioning units.
Energy consumption of ICT equipment is an important consideration for the ACT government. Energy consumption was a key consideration in the evaluation process to select the current provider of desktops and monitors to the government. The current standard desktop and monitor being deployed have lower energy consumption ratings than any previous models used. As I have noted, the government has implemented a process to transition out its ICT assets base which meets ISO 14001, the internationally accepted standard for environmental management systems.
A number of the initiatives identified in the Australian government’s ICT quick wins paper are already in operation in the ACT government, and we continue to actively explore further initiatives that form part of this paper—for example, the use of virtualisation technology where suitable and ensuring that ICT tenders for government work address relevant sustainability, waste reduction and greenhouse policies. The quick wins recommendations do, of course, need to be considered on their merits, in the life cycle of existing ICT resources and the practical operational requirements of ICT usage.
Automatic shutdown of certain PCs in a hospital setting would not, of course, be ideal. While it is now standard that government PCs are included in a default power management strategy that systematically reduces power consumption after a period of inactivity, there are exclusions for high-dependency computers. This power management strategy aims to reduce the energy consumption of computers by
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